It's an ad!

By Melissa Thibault

How do marketers target kids — and how can we teach kids to know the difference between advertising and fact? These websites provide strategies to build critical thinking skills for media literate kids.

Today’s kids, tomorrow’s consumers. Advertising agencies, marketing consultants, and corporations know how to reach their future customers. They effectively promote name recognition and brand loyalty, as well as collect customer information, to shape today’s wants into tomorrow’s needs. Given the commercial nature of much of the Internet, what can we as educators do to help our students become more media literate?

First, we need to understand our students at least as well as the commercial sector does! Knowing, developmentally, how a child functions can help us to understand what will be targeted by advertisers, and how we can respond. For example, middle school students are generally conformists; their self-image is shaped by the media, and they are unlikely to question online content. Pepsi responds with PepsiWorld, including rewards (Pepsistuff) for registering and an opportunity to be "behind the scenes" with Britney Spears. What young adolescent can resist these marketing lures? Educators can respond with a lesson about intrusive online marketing and privacy practices. The Media Awareness Network, a Canadian organization, provides a important guidelines to help you understand how marketing targets students of all ages.

Another highlight of the Media Awareness Network is the Web Awareness for teachers. This takes the concepts of media literacy online, adding the skills and activities kids need to make safe and wise decisions in the Web environment. Skills specific to the Internet include protecting privacy, recognizing online marketing techniques, and handling inappropriate content. The highly engaging interactive simulation for middle school students, Joe Cool or Joe Fool?, takes students through a series of mock sites to test their savvy surfing skills. Use the Teacher’s Guide to determine exactly which modules to choose to help your students handle online marketing, safety, and responsible Internet use. The full listing of lesson plans and instructional tools is available in the Lesson Library; you can sort by grade, subject or curriculum outcome to locate just the right approach for your class.

Sometimes we can learn more about where we are today by looking back at where we’ve been. The Media History Project from the University of Minnesota allows you to browse key events in media history by era, century, or decade. Related Internet resources grouped by technology span the ages, from Oral and Scribal Culture to Computing. A CourseWare page will point you to bibliographies, journals, professional organizations, and electronic discussion groups to further your understanding of media history.

More (much more!) information about media literacy, including where this fits into North Carolina Standards, is available from the Media Literacy Clearinghouse.